The Anatomy of Melancholy

Subsection 5. Old age as a cause

Secondary, particular efficient causes—so called in relation to the preceding causes—are either “congenital, internal, innate,” as they term them: inward, native, inborn; or else outward and acquired, arising after birth. Those congenital or born with us are either natural, such as old age, or “contrary to nature,” as Fernel calls it: the disordered constitution we inherit from our parents’ seed, since this is a hereditary disease.

The first of these, natural to everyone and unavoidable by any living person, is old age. Being cold and dry, and thus of the same quality as melancholy, it must necessarily cause it by diminishing the spirits and bodily substance and increasing the burnt humours. Accordingly, Melanchthon, following Aristotle, asserts as an unquestionable truth that “old people generally lose their reason in old age”: they commonly become confused “because of black bile,” which is then excessively abundant in them.

Rhazes, that Arab physician, in his Comprehensive Book, book 1, chapter 9, calls it a necessary and inseparable condition of all old and frail people. After seventy years, as the Psalmist says, all is trouble and sorrow. Common experience confirms this in weak and elderly people, especially those who have led active lives, held important positions, conducted much business, exercised great authority and supervised many servants, and then stop abruptly;

as Charles V did in yielding to King Philip, they suddenly give everything up, and melancholy overwhelms them at once. Or, if they continue in such activities, they eventually lose their reason—“an old man is twice a child”—and can no longer manage their affairs because of the ordinary infirmities of their age.

Full of aches, sorrow and grief, children again, fools, they often behave sullenly as they sit and talk to themselves. They are angry, irritable, displeased with everything, suspicious of everyone, contrary, greedy and hard, says Cicero; stubborn, superstitious, conceited, boastful and admiring of themselves, as Baldassare Castiglione has truly observed.

This natural infirmity is most conspicuous in old women, especially those who are poor, live alone, are held in the lowest esteem and live in beggary, or those who are witches. So much so that Weyer, Giambattista Porta, Ulrich Molitor and Edwicus attribute everything witches are said to do solely to imagination and this humour of melancholy.

And whereas it is disputed whether they can bewitch cattle to death, ride through the air out of a chimney on a carrying pole, transform themselves into cats, dogs and so on, transport bodies from place to place, meet in groups and dance as they do, or have sexual intercourse with the Devil, these writers attribute it all to the excessive melancholy that rules them, to sleep-inducing potions and natural causes, and to the Devil’s cunning.

“They do no harm at all,” says Weyer, On Witches, book 3, chapter 36, “nor perform any wonder, as people suppose; their imagination alone is impaired.” They perform no such wonders at all; their minds are merely disordered. They think they are witches and can do harm, but do not.